If you watched the 2007 documentary King of Kong or followed the controversy surrounding score-chaser Billy Mitchell, you know all about Donkey Kong's famous kill screen. For over four decades, no one was able to pass the game's 117th screen (aka level 22-1) due to a glitch in the game's bonus timer that kills Mario well before he can reach the top of the stage's girders.

That was true until last weekend, when Mario speedrunner Kosmic shared the news that he had passed the kill screen using a combination of frame-perfect emulator inputs, a well-known ladder movement glitch, and a bit of luck. And even though Kosmic's trick is functionally impossible to pull off with human reflexes on real hardware, the method shows how the game's seemingly insurmountable kill screen actually can be overcome without modifying the code on an official Donkey Kong arcade board.

Breaking the broken ladder

Donkey Kong's kill screen is a side effect of the limited 8-bit register the game uses when calculating the two largest digits of a level's Bonus Timer (which doubles as the overall timer for each screen). At level 22, this calculation makes the register overflow past 256 and back down to 4, giving Mario just a few seconds to complete the stage before instant death.

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Today's links

• "The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets": Maureen Tkacik on the monstrous corporate raider running DOGE.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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"The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (permalink)

While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:

https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/

Journalists like Wired's Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are absolutely crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:

https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/

And Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoop after scoop:

https://www.crisesnotes.com/

But for me, it was Tkacik – as usual – in the pages of The American Prospect who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook. While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):

https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/

Krause is a private equity looter. He's the guy who basically invented the playbook for PE takeovers of large tech companies, from Broadcom to Citrix to VMWare, converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs. He is a master enshittifier, an enshittification ninja.

Krause has an unerring instinct for making people miserable while making money. He oversaw the merger of Citrix and VMWare, creating a ghastly company called The Cloud Software Group, which sold remote working tools. Despite this, of his first official acts was to order all of his employees to stop working remotely. But then, after forcing his workers to drag their butts into work, move back across the country, etc, he reversed himself because he figured out he could sell off all of the company's office space for a tidy profit.

Krause canceled employee benefits, like thank you days for managers who pulled a lot of unpaid overtime, or bonuses for workers who upgraded their credentials. He also ended the company's practice of handing out swag as small gifts to workers, and then stiffed the company that made the swag, wontpaying a $437,574.97 invoice for all the tchotchkes the company had ordered. That's not the only supplier Krause stiffed: FinLync, a fintech company with a three-year contract with Krause's company, also had to sue to get paid.

Krause's isn't a canny operator who roots out waste: he's a guy who tears out all the wiring and then grudgingly restores the minimum needed to keep the machine running (no wonder Musk loves him, this is the Twitter playbook). As Tkacik reports, Krause fucked up the customer service and reliability systems that served Citrix's extremely large, corporate customers – the giant businesses that cut huge monthly checks to Citrix, whose CIOs received daily sales calls from his competitors.

Workers who serviced these customers, like disabled Air Force veteran David Morgan, who worked with big public agencies, were fired on one hour's notice, just before their stock options vested. The giant public agency customers he'd serviced later called him to complain that the only people they could get on the phone were subcontractors in Indian call centers who lacked the knowledge and authority to resolve their problems.

Last month, Citrix fired all of its customer support engineers. Citrix's military customers are being illegally routed to offshore customer support teams who are prohibited from working with the US military.

Citrix/VMWare isn't an exception. The carnage at these companies is indistinguishable from the wreck Krause made of Broadcom. In all these cases, Krause was parachuted in by private equity bosses, and he destroyed something useful to extract a giant, one-time profit, leaving behind a husk that no longer provides value to its customers or its employees.

This is the DOGE playbook. It's all about plunder: take something that was patiently, carefully built up over generations and burn it to the ground, warming yourself in the pyre, leaving nothing behind but ash. This is what private equity plunderers have been doing to the world's "advanced" economies since the Reagan years. They did it to airlines, family restaurants, funeral homes, dog groomers, toy stores, pharma, palliative care, dialysis, hospital beds, groceries, cars, and the internet.

Trump's a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class – like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers' carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins, while the crypto bros run off with their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money. Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples' productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. Musk and Krause, they're like two peas in a pod.

That's why – according to anonymous DOGE employees cited by Tckacik – DOGE managers are hired for their capacity for cruelty: "The criteria for DOGE is how many you have fired, how much you enjoy firing people, and how little you care about the impact on peoples well being…No wonder Tom Krause was tapped for this. He’s their dream employee!"

The fact that Krause isn't well known outside of plunderer circles is absolutely a feature for him, not a bug. Scammers like Krause want to be admitted to polite society. This is why the Sacklers – the opioid crime family that kicked off the Oxy pandemic that's murdered more than 800,000 Americans so far – were so aggressive about keeping their association with their family business, Purdue Pharma, a secret. The Sacklers only wanted to be associated with the art galleries and museums they put their names over, and their lawyers threatened journalists for writing about their lives as billionaire drug pushers (I got one of those threats).

There's plenty of good reasons to be anonymous – if you're a whistleblower, say. But if you ever encounter a corporate executive who insists on anonymity, that's a wild danger sign. Take Pixsy, the scam "copyleft trolls" whose business depends on baiting people into making small errors when using images licensed under very early versions of the Creative Common licenses, and then threatening to sue them unless they pay hundreds or thousands of dollars:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

Kain Jones, the CEO of Pixsy, tried to threaten me under the EU's GDPR for revealing the names of the scammer on his payroll who sent me a legal threat, and the executive who ran the scam for his business (I say he tried to threaten me because I helped lobby for the GDPR and I know for a fact that this isn't a GDPR violation):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

These people understand that they are in the business of ripping people off, causing them grave and wholly unjust financial injury. They value their secrecy because they are in the business of making strangers righteously furious, and they understand that one of these strangers might just show up in their lives someday to confront them about their transgressions.

This is why Unitedhealthcare freaked out so hard about Luigi Mangione's assassination of CEO Brian Thompson – that's not how the game is supposed to be played. The people who sit in on executive row, destroying your lives, are supposed to be wholly insulated from the consequences of their actions. You're not supposed to know who they are, you're not supposed to be able to find them – of course.

But even more importantly, you're not supposed to be angry at them. They pose as mere software agents in an immortal colony organism called a Limited Liability Corporation, bound by the iron law of shareholder supremacy to destroy your life while getting very, very rich. It's not supposed to be personal. That's why Unitedhealthcare is threatening to sue a doctor who was yanked out of surgery on a cancer patient to be berated by a UHC rep for ordering a hospital stay for her patient:

https://gizmodo.com/unitedhealthcare-is-mad-about-in-luigi-we-trust-comments-under-a-doctors-viral-post-2000560543

UHC is angry that this surgeon, Austin's Dr Elisabeth Potter, went Tiktok-viral with her true story of how how chaotic and depraved and uncaring UHC is. UHC execs fear that Mangione made it personal, that he obliterated the accountability sink of the corporation and put the blame squarely where it belongs – on the (mostly) men at the top who make this call.

This is a point Adam Conover made in his latest Factually podcast, where he interviewed Propublica's T Christian Miller and Patrick Rucker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_5tDXRw8kg

Miller and Rucker published a blockbuster investigative report into Cigna's Evocore, a secret company that offers claims-denials as a service to America's biggest health insurers:

https://www.propublica.org/article/evicore-health-insurance-denials-cigna-unitedhealthcare-aetna-prior-authorizations

If you're the CEO of a health insurance company and you don't like how much you're paying out for MRIs or cancer treatment, you tell Evocore (which processes all your claim authorizations) and they turn a virtual dial that starts to reduce the number of MRIs your customers are allowed to have. This dial increases the likelihood that a claim or pre-authorization will be denied, which, in turn, makes doctors less willing to order them (even if they're medically necessary) and makes patients more likely to pay for them out of pocket.

Towards the end of the conversation, Miller and Rucker talk about how the rank-and-file people at an insurer don't get involved with the industry to murder people in order to enrich their shareholders. They genuinely want to help people. But executive row is different: those very wealthy people do believe their job is to kill people to save money, and get richer. Those people are personally to blame for the systemic problem. They are the ones who design and operate the system.

That's why naming the people who are personally responsible for these immoral, vicious acts is so important. That's why it's important that Wired and Propublica are unmasking the "pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" who are raiding the federal government under Krause's leadership:

https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/

These people are committing grave crimes against the nation and its people. They should be known for this. It should follow them for the rest of their lives. It should be the lead in their obituaries. People who are introduced to them at parties should have a flash of recognition, hastily end the handshake, then turn on their heels and race to the bathroom to scrub their hands. For the rest of their lives.

Naming these people isn't enough to stop the plunder, but it helps. Yesterday, Marko Elez, the 25 year old avowed "eugenicist" who wanted to "normalize Indian hate" and could not be "[paid] to marry outside of my ethnicity," was shown the door. He's off the job. For the rest of his life, he will be the broccoli-haired brownshirt who got fired for his asinine, racist shitposting:

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury

After Krause's identity as the chief wrecker at DOGE was revealed, the brilliant Anna Merlan (author of Republic of Lies, the best book on conspiratorialism), wrote that "Now the whole country gets the experience of what it’s like when private equity buys the place you work":

https://bsky.app/profile/annamerlan.bsky.social/post/3lhepjkudcs2t

That's exactly it. We are witnessing a private equity-style plunder of the entire US government – of the USA itself. No one is better poised to write about this than Tkacik, because no one has private equity's number like Tkacik does:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Ironically, all this came down just as Trump announced that he was going to finally get rid of private equity's scammiest trick, the "carried interest" loophole that lets PE bosses (and, to a lesser extent, hedge fund managers) avoid billions in personal taxes:

https://archive.is/yKhvD

"Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest rate – it's a law that was designed for 16th century sea captains who had an "interest" in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Trump campaigned on killing this loophole in 2017, but Congress stopped him, after a lobbying blitz by the looter industry. It's possible that he genuinely wants to get rid of the carried interest loophole – he's nothing if not idiosyncratic, as the residents of Greenland can attest:

https://prospect.org/world/2025-02-07-letter-between-friendly-nations/

Even if he succeeds, looters and the "investor class" will get a huge giveaway under Trump, in the form of more tax giveaways and the dismantling of labor and environmental regulation. But it's far more likely that he won't succeed. Rather – as Yves Smith writes for Naked Capitalism – he'll do what he did with the Canada and Mexico tariffs: make a tiny, unimportant change and then lie and say he had done something revolutionary:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/is-trump-serious-about-trying-to-close-the-private-equity-carried-interest-loophole.html

This has been a shitty month, and it's not gonna get better for a while. On my dark days, I worry that it won't get better during my lifetime. But at least we have people like Tkacik to chronicle it, explain it, put it in context. She's amazing, a whirlwind. The same day that her report on Krause dropped, the Prospect published another must-read piece by her, digging deep into Alex Jones's convoluted bankruptcy gambit:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-02-06-crisis-actors-alex-jones-bankruptcy/

It lays bare the wild world of elite bankruptcy court, another critical conduit for protecting the immoral rich from their victims. The fact that Tkacik can explain both Krause and the elite bankruptcy system on the same day is beyond impressive.

We've got a lot of work ahead of ourselves. The people in charge of this system – whose names you must learn and never forget – aren't going to go easily. But at least we know who they are. We know what they're doing. We know how the scam works. It's not a flurry of incomprehensible actions – it's a playbook that killed Red Lobster, Toys R Us, and Sears. We don't have to follow that playbook.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• 10 things Chairman Andrew Ferguson could do today to help people with the cost of living https://twitter.com/BedoyaFTC/status/1887222389408215548?t=72YMDDbEwrxgwYbfDnaGQw

• The Business Community Is Extraordinarily Stupid https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-business-community-is-extraordinarily

• Stop Worshiping the American Tech Giants https://archive.ph/YqEem#selection-4600.1-4600.3

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Hacking the no-fly list is only bad if you like no-fly lists https://web.archive.org/web/20050210021849/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/weblog/nb.cgi/view/vitanuova/2005/02/07/0

#20yrsago Toronto’s Bakka Books moving back to Queen St, March 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20050207210939/https://bakkaphoenixbooks.com/movingpage.html

#20yrsago EFF app helps sysadmins find sneaky logs before The Man does https://web.archive.org/web/20050213011718/http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_02.php

#20yrsago Canadian Internet pharmacies being strong-armed by US pharma http://www.michaelgeist.ca/resc/html_bkup/feb72005.html

#15yrsago Turd transplant leads to rapid weight-gain https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31168511

#10yrsago Anyone who makes you choose between privacy and security wants you to have neither https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/the-real-impact-of-surveillance/

#10yrsago The Seven-Year-Old Diet https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/07/the-seven-year-old-diet/

#10yrsago Andy Offutt, insanely prolific porn pioneer https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/magazine/my-dad-the-pornographer.html

#10yrsago Samsung: watch what you say in front of our TVs, they’re sending your words to third parties https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2uuvdz/samsung_smarttv_privacy_policy_please_be_aware/

#1yrago The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Boskone (Boston), Feb 14
  https://schedule.boskone.org/62/

• Picks and Shovels with Ken Liu (Boston), Feb 14
  https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels

• Picks and Shovels with Yanis Varoufakis (Jacobin/virtual), Feb 15
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4LM

• Picks and Shovels with Charlie Jane Anders (Menlo Park), Feb 17
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow

• Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton (Los Angeles), Feb 18
  https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Cory-Doctorow-Wil-Wheaton-Author-signing

• Picks and Shovels with Dan Savage (Seattle), Feb 19
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989

• Picks and Shovels at Another Story (Toronto), Feb 23
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/picks-shovels-cory-doctorow-tickets-1219803217259

• Ursula Franklin Lecture (Toronto), Feb 24
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/2025-ursula-franklin-lecture-cory-doctorow-tickets-1218373831929

• Picks and Shovels with John Hodgman (NYC), Feb 26
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-john-hodgman-picks-and-shovels-tickets-1131132841779

• Picks and Shovels (Penn State), Feb 27
  https://www.bellisario.psu.edu/assets/uploads/CoryDoctorow-Poster.pdf

• Picks and Shovels at the Doylestown Bookshop (Doylestown, PA), Mar 1
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1146230880419

• Picks and Shovels at Red Emma's (Baltimore), Mar 2
  https://redemmas.org/events/cory-doctorow-presents-picks-and-shovels/

• Picks and Shovels with Matt Stoller (DC), Mar 4
  https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels

• Picks and Shovels with Lee Vinsel (Richmond, VA), Mar 5
  https://fountainbookstore.com/events/1795820250305

• With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Indiana University/virtual), Mar 7
  https://events.iu.edu/mediaiub/event/1783095-with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshitti

• Picks and Shovels at First Light Books (Austin), Mar 10
  https://thethirdplace.is/event/cory-doctorow-picks-shovels-1

• Picks and Shovels at Dark Delicacies (Burbank), Mar 13
  https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3257/Thu%2C_Mar_13th_6_pm%3A_Pick_%26_Shovel%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/

• Cloudfest (Europa Park), Mar 17-20
  https://cloudfest.link/

• Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast (Remote), Mar 24
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189

• Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal (Chicago), Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• ABA Techshow (Chicago), Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern (Bloomington), Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Teardown 2025 (PDX), Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• DeepSouthCon63 (New Orleans), Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Elon Musk's Digital Coup and the Future of the Internet (System Crash)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEZPa-YzaUs

• A Weird Way to Win the Trade War with Trump (Canadaland)
  https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/1100-a-weird-way-to-win-the-trade-war-with-trump/

• Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley (How To Academy)
  https://www.ivoox.com/en/novelist-and-activist-cory-doctorow-fear-and-audios-mp3_rf_138898836_1.html

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Latest books (permalink)

• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Canada shouldn't retaliate with US tariffs https://craphound.com/overclocked/2025/02/02/canada-shouldnt-retaliate-with-us-tariffs/

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

it's hard to keep posting fun creative projects while your country is being gutted, but I'll keep going until I can't anymore #

Here is some good news: the white nationalist terrorist group Proud Boys have lost control of their trademarks. They are now controlled by a Black church in Washington DC that the group attacked in 2020.

Last Tuesday, a frontal cyclone rapidly deepened over the Pacific Ocean about 1,000 km to the west of Seattle. The storm was a “triple bomb”, meaning it reached around triple the 24 hPa in 24 hours threshold for explosive cyclogenesis, or “bombogenesis”. The minimum pressure reached about 945 hPa by Tuesday evening, one of the lowest pressure readings ever recorded in that part of the Pacific Ocean. We’ll never know the exact minimum because the storm took out the closest buoy, designated buoy 46005, prior to reaching peak intensity.

The storm produced some incredible eye candy and was the leading story on the national news on Wednesday.

Bomb cyclone goes boom.An incredible view of the deepening low pressure system approaching the Pacific Northwest.

— Dakota Smith (@weatherdak.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T01:53:35.180Z

Given there was a record-breaking storm in proximity to the PNW, one might naturally expect that the storm would produce major damage. Many Seattle residents fielded texts and phone calls from friends and family in other parts of the country asking about how we were faring during the big storm.

There was pretty much just one impact from this storm — extreme localized wind. By midnight Wednesday, more than half a million customers in western Washington had no power, including almost the entire eastern suburbs of King and Snohomish counties.

10:30 PM Power Outage Update:PSE: 338,997Snohomish PUD: 115,477Seattle City Light: 79,473WA Total: 555,577 (leads US)#wawx #BombCyclone

— Matthew Pfab (@matthewpfabwx.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T06:41:14.665Z

To many people casually following the storm, the 1:1 relationship between the bomb cyclone and extreme wind seems pretty straightforward. Big storm produced big wind. End of story.

To those who follow PNW weather more closely, the distribution of wind damage looked atypical. The wind direction was different than usual events, the strongest winds were less widespread, and the winds were not particularly strong in areas prone to “gap” winds such as North Bend. Many reports suggested that some of the worst damage was in a band from Maple Valley-Hobart up through Redmond, an area not known for being the epicenter of strong windstorms. So I thought it was worth ending my blogging hiatus to give a little more meteorological context to what happened here.

This event was a textbook example of a downslope windstorm — a phenomenon that is more commonly observed in places like Boulder, Colorado, but can occasionally happen in western Washington when conditions are right.

What is a downslope windstorm?

In short, downslope windstorms occur when flow going over a mountain rapidly accelerates as it descends on the lee side of the mountain before undergoing a hydraulic jump, resulting in highly turbulent flow close to the ground on the downstream side of the mountain (near Boulder in this case).

The theory of how downslope windstorms form is a bit tricky to describe because the math uses highly idealized terrain and fluids. The closest analogy to what occurs in the atmosphere is when shallow water in a river flows up and over a smooth rock before undergoing a rapid and turbulent “hydraulic jump” downstream of the rock that appears visually incongruent with the surrounding slower streamflow.

The equations require the air above the mountain to be close to a “critical level” that is determined by the height of the mountain and the speed of the wind. Under certain goldilocks conditions, the wind can accelerate on both the upwind and downwind side of the mountain before undergoing the abrupt hydraulic jump near the base of the mountain on the lee side that is akin to the river water flowing down over the smooth rock.

Practically, meteorologists know to look for a number of conditions that can potentially lead to downslope windstorms (Markowski and Richardson 2010):

1. Strong cross-mountain winds (> 30 mph) at and just above mountain-top level associated with surface high pressure upstream and low pressure downstream.
2. A stable layer near or just above mountaintop, and a layer of lesser stability above.
3. A level that exhibits a wind direction reversal, or where the cross-barrier flow simply goes to zero (this indicates a critical level).
4. Absence of a deep, cold, stable layer in the lee of the mountains, which may keep the downslope flow from penetrating to the surface.

For (1), the low-level flow was orientated from east to west and the bomb cyclone provided the pressure gradient and winds across the Cascades. Note the direction of the 10m wind barbs across the Cascades in Washington State below, from 7 PM Tuesday.

For (2) and (3), frontal boundary was responsible for providing both the stable layer and the wind reversal above the height of the mountains. This may have been the most important aspect of this event — the center of the bomb cyclone remained well offshore but it had an amazing occluded front that curved from British Columbia down through Washington, Oregon, and northern California. A satellite image from 9 PM Tuesday shows the front directly over the Cascades:

Higher up in the atmosphere, at 500 hPa, the wind was blowing from the southwest.

In order for the wind to veer from easterly at low levels to southwesterly at upper levels, there must have been a critical level in the middle where it was exactly from the south, meaning the cross-barrier flow across a north-south orientated mountain range like the Cascades would be exactly zero. This is an essential condition for a downslope windstorm to be possible.

The stable layer within the frontal boundary was a little harder to pick up, but the UW-WRF forecast sounding for 10 PM Tuesday night does show detect the front around 800 hPa, along with the wind shift and a layer of slightly greater stability (less temperature decrease with height). The wind speeds were also in excess of 50 kt both above and below the front.

Condition (4) is also clearly satisfied in the above sounding — there was no stable layer near the surface, as would be expected in the evening of an active weather day where the surface was well-mixed.

Did the weather models capture the windstorm?

Most models did show strong wind gusts in western Washington on Tuesday evening. However, the global models appeared to show more of a gap wind event, with the strongest winds downstream of the mountain passes in areas like North Bend. The only model that appeared to correctly detect mountain wave activity was the UW-WRF, and in particular the high resolution 1.33 km version run that resolved the fine-scale details of the terrain well enough to pick up on the mountain wave activity.

The 1.33 km maximum wind gust forecast for 10 PM Tuesday from the Tuesday morning WRF run shows gusts of up to 60 kt (70 mph) in the eastern suburbs of Seattle. The highest blue and orange contours are almost exactly in the location where the strongest winds were observed, from Enumclaw to Issaquah to Redmond. These locations are also tend to be directly to the west-northwest of taller mountains, which is exactly where one would expect a hydraulic jump.

The UW-WRF also has another nifty product that shows the maximum wind speed within 250 m of the surface. Ripples that look like gravity wave signatures are even more apparent just above the ground in a number of locations such as south of Tacoma. The tricky part about mountain wave forecasting is that some of these mountain waves were likely just above the ground but high enough to avoid catastrophic damage. Airplanes approaching Sea-Tac certainly felt these waves, as a number of flights had to abort landings or divert to other airports.

The UW-WRF also outputs a west-east cross section which starts at the Pacific coast on the left side and runs through Seattle and Leavenworth before ending on the right near Spokane. Here are two of those cross sections showing the wind speeds in color contours. These are forecasts for 7 PM and 10 PM last Tuesday:

Both of these cross sections readily show a band of strong wind accelerating down the western slopes of the Cascades along with a series of waves reaching close to the ground on the eastern side of the Puget Sound lowlands.

So the evidence clearly points to a downslope windstorm being the culprit of the strongest winds, with the 1.33 km UW-WRF almost perfectly nailing the location of the worst damage.

It wasn’t just the model that nailed the forecast — meteorologists at NWS Seattle also picked up on the mountain wave threat on Monday morning and issued high wind watches and warnings for the correct locations.

This flow reversal brings up the possibility of mountain wave activity in the foothills Tuesday night in addition to the strong easterly winds caused by the  gradients. Always hard to predict where the mountain waves will  surface if they develop. In past mountain wave events Enumclaw, Buckley, Black Diamond and as far west as Maple Valley have been  hit by surfacing mountain waves. Will issue a high wind watch for  Tuesday night for the coast, Western Strait of Juan de Fuca, East  Puget Sound Lowlands and the Bellevue area.

What were the strongest observed wind gusts?

Unfortunately, the combination of a lack of quality 10 meter anemometers and widespread power outages meant there were few observations of the strongest winds in the locations that the worst damage occurred.

The Enumclaw RAWS station reported 66 mph and storm chasers in that general area also measured 70+ mph winds. I can’t find any observations of strong winds around Issaquah, but the tree and roof damage around Issaquah high school and Mirrormont suggests 60-70 mph winds as well. The unusual wind direction was also likely a culprit in knocking down trees.

Wrapping up

The popular narrative that a record-breaking bomb cyclone produced strong winds in the Seattle area is basically correct, but this post hopefully provided some added context to those wondering why the strongest winds occurred in some unusual locations.

As someone who specialized in mountain meteorology in graduate school, I find these windstorms fascinating and I hope some of that was reflected in the analysis above. If any of my readers have further context to provide from observations on the ground, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.

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